Core concepts

Slate is one home for every AI coding tool: every session live on your Mac, and one memory plus one set of skills and rules for all 16 tools. Six ideas underlie it.

1. Everything is a doc#

The doc is Slate's universal unit. A group, a project, a design doc and a captured AI session are all rows in one doc table, told apart by an optional doc_type. Docs nest in a tree (parent_id), order by a fractional position so drag-reorder never renumbers the tree, and hold their content as block-editor JSON. The same few operations (create, read, update, move, Trash) work everywhere, by hand or by AI.

2. Typed documents give work structure#

A doc can be typed: group, project, branch, plan, design, review, meeting, test-plan, bug-report, mission or plain general. The type pre-fills a template and limits where the doc can live. A branch sits under a project. A project sits under a group or stands alone. Knowledge docs (plans, designs, reviews) hang off any of them, so memory tools resolve "the plan for the branch I'm on" without an id.

3. One memory, shared over MCP#

Slate is also a memory server. It speaks MCP, so any of the 16 tools, or Slate's own Home, calls the same two verbs:

• recall at the start of a task loads the relevant context: the brief for your branch, project conventions, project memories.
• remember at the end saves a decision, result or preference, filed on the doc the hierarchy resolves to.

A filesystem watcher captures the sessions themselves, so memory grows even when a tool forgets to write.

4. Agents drive your CLIs#

Slate ships no model and asks for no API key. An agent is a thin driver over a CLI you already installed and signed in to: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, OpenCode, Gemini, Cline, Grok Build, Kiro, Qwen Code, Droid, Hermes Agent, Goose, Kilo Code or Auggie. Slate launches it from Rust, so credentials stay in those tools. A light model works because code resolves the tool and prefills its arguments and the model fills only the gaps.

5. Toolkit is one playbook for every tool#

Toolkit is where you write instructions and skills once, in AGENTS.md and .slate/, and project them into every agent's native config. Change the playbook, run yarn studio sync, and every tool picks it up. Features by Agent says which tools it reaches today.

6. A workspace is shared or private as a whole#

Workspaces share by container. A team's workspace is the team's, and everything in it is shared. Your Personal workspace starts unshared and syncs only if you switch its sharing on. Each shared workspace is its own SQLite file; switch from the top of the rail. Nothing is marked doc by doc: private work stays in an unshared workspace.

Sharing is one-way, and each doc has one writer, its author. That keeps merge conflicts and version columns out of the design. A teammate's doc opens read-only in the real editor, with a line saying why.